What the hell is this thing called spare time?

The following is an excerpt from my new book about children's activities - I'm about 1/4 of the way through so far. This is first draft material, so don't let typos and nonsensical sentences bog you down.

From the section dealing with youth sports:


What kind of coach are you?

I ask what kind of coach you are because you will coach. Seriously. The league will ask you and you will say yes because you don’t have any will power when it comes to things like that. Actually, this applies to every activity your children have – the organizers will ask and you will say yes. It’s as much a rule of nature as survival of the fittest or that lottery winners will find a way to become poor again. When you sign Junior up for Little League, they will ask you to coach and you’ll cave like a Kentucky coal mine.

The most important thing to do is categorize yourself as a coach. If the internet has taught us one thing it is that there is a lot of pornography out there. A lot. Like, so much that it is amazing that you have to start asking yourself, where are all these naked women coming from? Statistically, we must be getting to the point where some of these women are going to be from my own neighborhood and I’ll start to recognize them at the supermarket, picking up the kids from school, etc. I’ll wander up and say, “Don’t I recognize you from somewhere?” And the woman will answer, “You may have seen some of my work at HornyMomsAreWaitingForYouSeriouslyWe’reTotallyNotEvenKidding.com.” I won’t know what to say next and I’ll probably be embarrassed and walk away which works out well since Stacy probably won’t be too keen on me talking to amateur porn stars anyway.

But if the internet has taught us anything else, it is that humans fit neatly into different categories and those categories can be easily defined by taking a simple, 30 question true or false quiz where you are not given the option of answering “I don’t know” or “Maybe.” I enjoy being alone more than I enjoy being with people – true or false. No ambiguity allowed – you’re either a Unabomberesque hermit who hates people or a Paris Hilton-like attention seeker who will die unless you are the focus of at least a roomful of people.

A quick search for “personality quiz” on Google.com (Google.com: Making meaningful research totally antiquated and irrelevant) shows a total of 2,200,000 different hits. Among these two million plus sites designed to help quantify (does that word work here?) yourself, you can use short quizzes to determine your Simpsons personality, your Harry Potter personality, your Lover personality and your Personality personality. You can take the Free Five Minute Personality Quiz, the World’s Shortest Personality Test (and, one assumes, with a little digging the two million sites, the World’s Longest Personality Test), The Church of Scientology Personality Test and the What Poetry Form Am I? Personality Test.

All of these personality quizzes give you neat little answers to let you know who you are – like a lifelong quest for self-awareness, except you can do it on company time without leaving your chair. After you take the test, you will be lumped into one of – usually – between 5 and 10 categories. Sometimes the answers suck and they just tell you who you are, which isn’t much help.

You are Dr. Julius Hibbert.

Sometimes they have semi-helpful explanation of what your personality is all about, so you can begin planning your life around whatever foolish category you have landed in.

Short, terse, unfriendly,
Yet sometimes quite emotive;
I am the Haiku.

And, of course the best tests give you famous people who also fit your personality.

Some Famous ENFJs:
David, King Of Israel
President Abraham Linclon
Randy Quaid of Bye-bye Love and Moving
Oprah

Which then leaves you wondering when the hell David, King of Israel and President Lincoln had time to take a Meyers-Briggs personality test, but you try not to let that bother you, as you have Oprah and randy Quaid in your lifeboat, too.

The point is, everyone is quantifiable and fits neatly into some category. Coaches are no exception. Oddly enough, I couldn’t find any tests designed to tell you what Coaching Personality you are (I mean, they probably exist somewhere in the 2 millions Google hits, but I lost interest in searching), so I decided to create one on my own. Then I discovered how much work it really is (hint: just enough to keep me from completing it) and I decided to just give you the answers and let you make up your own mind which coach you are based on the examples you have seen. Or don’t – lie to yourself if you want. It won’t bother me.

The Coaching Types

Clueless: Clueless can’t believe he got roped into coaching a sports team. The closest he’s ever been to a sporting event was when the Star Trek convention was held across the street from Fenway Park. Everyone knows Clueless has no idea how to play the game, but by the time the season starts they are so desperate for coaches they’d take anyone with a pulse – or even a guy without a pulse if they could get Andrew McCarthy and Jonathan Silverman to drag him around the field.

Because Clueless has spent his entire life being such a non-athletic nerd, he will have developed the condescending notion that there is nothing more to sports than brute strength. Therefore, when he finds out he will be coaching, he mistakenly believes that he can Google “soccer” or “basketball” and find out everything he needs to know about the game in 15 minutes. Thus, when he shows up for the first practice, he may have some vague idea how the game is played, but he quickly discovered that every sport has approximately six trillion subtleties built into it that take years to figure out. For instance, if he is coaching Little League, it will be at the first practice that he discovers he has no idea which is left field and which is right field. I know, athletes reading this are saying, “Right field is to the right, Poindexter.” Ah, but the right in relation to what? The fence? Home plate? I only bring this up because one of my children had a coach that asked this very question not once, but twice last year.

Clueless has two bits of good news coming to him, though. First, there will be no shortage of parents who do know what’s going on and aren’t afraid to scream it from the stands. My advice is to pretend you don’t hear the shouts – don’t even acknowledge that someone is yelling at you, even if it is over the fence from four feet away. Wait thirty seconds, then do exactly what the yelling parent said to do. The delay will serve to piss off the moron who doesn’t understand he is watching 7 year old play basketball and no amount of incorrect coaching (or correct coaching, for that matter) will effect the score a noticeable amount. Also, the delay will give the impression that whatever you were doing wrong was completely planned and on purpose. Of course you knew you only had three players on the court – it’s all part of The Plan. But now that you’ve bewildered the other team, maybe you’ll go ahead and slide those last two players out onto the court.

The second piece of good news for Clueless is that his job is completely safe. No matter how many fans and parents are screaming for his head and no matter how many times he forgets the rules of the game and no matter how badly the other team is destroying his team, he will make it through the season without being replaced. Why? Because if they could have filled the position with someone more competent than him they would have done so at the beginning of the season.

How to tell if you are Clueless: This is very simple. Ask yourself the following questions. 1. True or false: When I found out I was going to coach the team, I went out and purchased a whistle and an outfit suited to the particular sport I am coaching. 2. True or false: I researched the sport before the season.

If you answered true to either question, you are Clueless. Good luck – you’re going to need it. Of course, Win At All Costs will also answer true to both of those questions, but he won’t have been wondering whether or not he is Clueless. He’ll be sure, for reasons which will be apparent, that he knows his sport.

Season Prediction: 0 - 10 (that’s no wins and ten losses, Clueless). Unless another team fails to show up and is forced to forfeit. But, there is a chance that Clueless could lose even that game. On the plus side, Clueless won’t care, because even at the end of the season he’ll still be under the impression that it isn’t about winning or losing.

Win At All Costs: Most everyone will hate Win At All Costs – the parents, the players, the refs, the league, his own kids. He will be universally despised and talked about like he is a lower life form (Which he is. Which explains why he has the ability and time to become so invested in a youth sports league).

The most interesting aspect of Win At All Costs is that he is the only category of coach that may not have children of his own on the team. Sometimes he actually has a kid on the team. Sometimes he kid will be on the team in a few years and he’s building a team in the meantime. Sometimes he won’t even be married and will have no children of his own, which means he’s either a Pervert or he is such a moron he thinks coaching a Little League team is his first step toward being picked up as the manager of the Red Sox. If you are a parent of a child on the team, pray he’s a pervert – he’ll do less damage to your child’s psyche.

Like Clueless, Win At All Costs has done research to prepare for the season; however, Win At All Costs didn’t Google “soccer” and call it good. No, he spent weeks watching World Cup video, a month breaking down an offensive play called “Walking The Line” and at least half a year researching obscure rules such as 501.8c – “A player wearing green socks may obstruct the ball out of bounds only if the opposing team maintains a three goal lead (I made that up, Clueless, so just ignore it).” And then he’ll find a way to use it during a game that season. Interestingly enough, Win At All Costs can remember every rule in the book, but he can’t remember the PIN for his debit card without writing it down – but he “cleverly” writes it backwards on the protective envelope so no one will ever figure it out. This pretty much sums up Win At All Costs’ life and why he’s living in a van down by the river and eating cardboard for dinner.

Without sports, Win At All Costs would probably be in prison (in fact, he may have done that, too). Unable to relate to people on a normal level, he talks in sports analogies with everything he does. He talks about hustle and spirit and grit. He’ll bluntly inform you that your kid isn’t playing because he sucks and has no coordination. He’ll bench his own kid for two games because of a fielding error. He’ll make a star athlete wonder if it’s all worth it. He’ll make a spastic nerd kid want to quit during the first 15 minutes of practice. By the time the season is over, the parents won’t know whether to lynch him or chip in and buy him a present.

Win At All Costs isn’t all bad – he will win games. In fact, should he ever lose a game the players will be so traumatized after his tirade that the lesser players will quit en masse. He’ll scream and spit and froth and tell the players they play like little girls (even if they are little girls, which will still be an insult for some reason). He’ll hold double session practices for the next week and pretty much make everyone’s life a living hell until the team they play next has been absolutely humiliated in a crushing defeat. And even them he will wake with cold sweats in the middle of the night thinking about the one game they lost. Anything less than absolute perfection will not be tolerated.

When I said he isn’t all bad, I guess I mean if you are just like him you may not think he’s all bad.


Season Prediction: 9 – 1 if he has a bunch of no talent hacks on the team – undefeated if he is lucky enough to have a few quality players.


The Pervert: Fortunately, the Pervert is much less common today than he was years ago. Today sports organizations generally have the good sense to run background checks on the coaches, so at least all the pervs who have been arrested are weeded out. Remember back in the early nineties how you would constantly see news articles about how Mr. So and So who had coached Little League and was a Scoutmaster for 37 years was discovered to have been arrested 17 times for distribution of child pornography? Background checks have eliminated that sort of thing, so now you know that if the coach is The Pervert, he’s been hiding it pretty well.

Of course, the Pervert is still easy to spot – he’s the coach that’s waaaay too interested in the kids and never seems to even be aware that there is a game happening. 90% of the time he’ll have an arm around one of the kids, giving them a “pep talk” and completely creeping them out.

Unfortunately, because all the pervs who have prior arrest records have been weeded out, what we are left with is, essentially, the competent pervs who know how to hide it well. So, be careful, as the Pervert has been known to disguise himself as Clueless, Too Good To Be True and Mr. Laid Back. As a general rule, you won’t find him masquerading as Win At All Costs or The Screamer since he won’t want to make the kids afraid of him.

Season Prediction: No record – parents will quickly start pulling their kids when he is discovered to be a big perv.


The Screamer: During the first game, most people will incorrectly identify the Screamer as Win At All Costs. After all, he yells, he freaks out at the smallest things – sometimes getting in a lather over what appears to be nothing at all. Parents figure he must be Win At All Costs, right? It’s only when the team falls to 1 – 3 that everyone realizes the coach is actually The Screamer – mostly hot air.

The Screamer may sound like Win At All Costs, but he actually has a knowledge base of his sport more along the line of Clueless. The Screamer believes that the best way to mask his total incompetence is to simply yell at everyone he sees. Kids can’t hit the ball today? A good tongue lashing ought to motivate them. Other team seems to be scoring at will? A good old fashioned tirade, complete with throwing equipment should do the trick. Sometimes the Screamer resembles the Tasmanian Devil as he flails around and kicks at dirt.

The child athletes aren’t the only people to get yelled at – the Screamer has no problem bombing targets of opportunity as they arise. The more people he screams at, the better job he must be doing. Parents who bring their children late to practice often find themselves on the receiving end of the Screamer’s invective. Umpires and referees will be completely bewildered by the Screamer as he disputes calls which went his team’s way. Nobody will be able to figure out why he yelled at the concession stand attendant.

There are other ways a coach can become The Screamer. In the old days, the Screamer might have been Drunk Coach – the kind of guy who could coach Little League because he didn’t have a day job. These days it seems parents have decided to reconsider the wisdom of dropping a kid off at practice with a guy drinking tall boys at 3:15 on a Tuesday. Drunk Coach usually didn’t care too much what happened on the field, so long as he greatly inconvenienced by the game, i.e., he runs out of beer before the sixth inning. However, now that Drunk Coach is no longer socially acceptable – in as much as he was ever socially acceptable – he usually ends up becoming the Screamer as he finds his tolerance for young children to be much lower when he has to wait until 5:00 pm for his first drink. He may or may not understand the rules of the game and how to play, but none of that really matters as he’s still seeing double from the bender the night before. He finds the easiest thing to do is just yell at someone every so often.

Season Prediction: 6 – 4. The Screamer’s team wins a surprising amount of the time, given that he isn’t really coaching. Fear, it turns out, will motivate many of the players to actually try harder in a vain attempt to avoid becoming the object of a full-blown rage. If the little boogers were smart enough to figure out that there is no way to avoid the Screamer’s fits, they’d all quit – fortunately for the Screamer, they never figure that out.


My Kid Plays: There is an unwritten rule of kids’ sports: If you are willing to devote the time and energy to being the coach of the team, you have earned the right to play your kid slightly more than the other kids/more than he deserves. Sure, once in a while you’ll hear The Complainer (a sports parent type) whine about how his kid should bat lead off because he has a higher OBP than the coach’s kid, but any reasonable parent who thinks about it for a moment will agree that the coach’s kid should get more playing time as a thanks that you didn’t have to coach. There aren’t too many perks to coaching the Under 8 St. Mary’s Basketball Team, so rational people should begrudge the coach’s kid extra playing time even if he has the coordination of a newborn fawn.

My Kid Plays, however, misses the point and clearly has chosen to coach for the sole purpose of making sure his kid plays every second of every game, even if the kid hate’s the sport. At first, it may My Kid Plays is making the reasonable choice to bat his kid lead off every game – but when he decides to bat him every other man, people start to notice. My Kid Plays will always put his kid at pitcher, even if the kid throws like a right handed girl throwing left handed (Whoah! Put away the pitch forks and torches – I have a perfectly reasonable explanation as to why “throwing like a girl” is a valid description which does not warrant a lynching of the person who uttered it – watch for it later). My Kid Plays is operating under one of two assumptions: either he has totally fooled himself into believing his kid is the next Michael Jordan, or he believes playing as much and as often as possible will transform the kid into the next Michael Jordan. Unfortunately, the sad truth of the matter is that the kid is usually mediocre to terrible and generally couldn’t care less if he played or sat the bench.

My Kid Plays is often an ex-athlete himself who dreams of glory for his spawn – he should read my notice to new fathers at the beginning of this section and just stop.

Season Prediction: 7 – 3. Then they lose the first round of the playoffs because My Kid Plays decides his kid should start at center against an opposing center a foot taller.

Other Minor Coaching Types

Mr. Laid Back: Easy to spot in his Hawaiian shirt and sandals, Mr. Laid Back is just there to get the job done. Usually Mr. Laid Back has a relatively respectable knowledge of the game and its rules – he just doesn’t care. The upside is, all the kids will play the same amount. The downside is that all the kids will play the same amount.
Season Prediction: 5 –5

Too Good To Be True: Maybe he is more coach than you deserve, maybe he’s pervert in disguise, but the one thing that is certain about Too Good To Be True is that he will make you feel totally inadequate as a parent when you discover that he coaches the team, volunteers down at the senior center, reads to the kids and tucks them in bed at night and still manages to hold a job earning $150k a year.
Season Prediction: 8 – 2. The kids will do well, but he doesn’t demand perfection. Go ahead – hate him for being perfect. Everyone else does.

So there you have seven basic types of coach. Feel free to pick a style for yourself, but be sure to dress it up a bit and make it your own. If you want to be the Screamer, carry a machete just for the reactions it will get. If you’re going to be the Pervert, be the best pervert you can be – carry good quality candy not American chocolate to lure children behind the dugout.

Remember, choose something you’ll be comfortable with because you’re going to have this personality as long as your kid is a kid. Why? Because only thing you can be sure of than being asked to coach is that if you say yes once, you’ll be coaching forever.